Columbine to Sandy Hook: Controversial Decision Mass Shooting Schools Face

Sean Schultz, a father of a student at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, emotionally approached the podium at a Barrow County School System board meeting last month.

“My child doesn’t feel safe going back (to school),” Schultz said to a jam-packed room just weeks after the district announced classes would resume after a deadly shooting.

“It seems to be something like we threw a lot of extra officers and personnel at for the first week, and he’s [my son] already told me that most of them are not there anymore.”

Deciding what to do with school buildings where shootings have occurred is a difficult process an increasing amount of school districts across the country must face.

In 2024 alone, there have been at least 178 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 52 deaths and 120 injuries nationally at the time of publication, according to the Everytown for Gun Safety organization.

Expert Weighs In

Eileen Kennedy-Moore is a Princeton, New Jersey-based clinical psychologist and the author of books for parents, children, and mental health professionals.

She spoke with Newsweek on September 24 about the “terror” Apalachee High School students likely faced upon their turn to school after the fatal incident.

“It is very, very important for their recovery to get back to normal, or as normal as we can make it, with their environment, the routines, and the predictability, ” she said. “That’s terrifying, but we know that avoidance makes anxiety grow, so we want them to have an ordinary, slightly boring social studies class. We want them to see their friends and their teachers going about their day. We want to emphasize that school is a place where there are a lot of people looking out for you and care about you, and we want to emphasize that it will get easier.”

She also talked about giving kids as much normalcy as possible.

“It’s not that they ought to be able to cope with this because it is wrong that they have to cope with this. This is something that no kid should have to deal with. Adults are letting them down,” Kennedy-Moore said. “They should be afraid of, you know, their crush isn’t going to talk to them, or they didn’t study enough for the science test. Those are developmentally typical anxieties. They should not be worried ‘Am I going to die today if I go to school?'”

The Kid Confidence: Help Your Child Make Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real Self-Esteem author said kids in this tough situation need “support,” ideally from “at least one adult who loves them and can is capable of taking care of them.” Some kids may need to see a guidance counselor or take medication.

“We want to offer our confidence that they can do this. They can go to their classes. They can be with their friends,” Kennedy-Moore said. “With some kids. It might also be useful to talk about how your classmates need you there. They need to see you walking through the halls and doing ordinary things. If you show up, you are helping yourself and you’re also helping your classmates.”

Michigan State University Student Speaks Out

Saylor Reinders was in her dorm room on February 13, 2023, when gunman Anthony Dwayne McRae opened fire in Michigan State University’s Berkey Hall and the student union, killing three students and wounding five others.

Classes resumed that spring, but the sections of Berkey Hall and the union’s food court where the tragedy occurred remained closed.

MSU President Kevin Guskiewicz announced this August that the affected part of Berkey Hall is being renovated into an open space for individuals to gather, engage, and reflect on the event. The section of the union also reopened.

“I personally don’t see myself going back into that space (Berkey Hall), but I think for others, it may be something they choose to do and could be healing for them,” Reinders, who is the co-president of the Students Demand Action chapter at MSU, told Newsweek.

Reflecting on how the university handled the aftermath of the shooting, Reinders feels the school chose to open up Berkey Hall “too early and too soon.”

“The decisions with what to do with these spaces should be rooted in survivors and their experiences,” she said. “I believe they should have waited until we passed the year mark.”

Reinders said 600 respondents completed a Students Demand Action-created survey the found many others felt the same way.

“The overwhelming response was that people had not been consulted, and they also were not ready for it to be reopened or to go back to that space. I think the university could have done a better job of hearing from students about what they needed.”

Reinders currently has a class in Berkey Hall which she says changed locations over the summer.

“I don’t know why it switched buildings. I was upset that I didn’t receive any information from the university about it, but I have been going to class. The first few days it was kind of weird re-entering that space. I hadn’t been back there since February 13, but I’m not on the side of the building where everything occurred, and I’m on the second floor, which, to me, helps,” she said.

Newsweek has contacted MSU for comment.

Apalachee High School

Students returned to Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, nearly one month after suspected gunman Colt Gray opened fire, killing two students and two teachers on September 4, 2024.

Starting September 24, students completed half-days in the building where the tragic incident occurred. They resumed full days starting October 14. J Hall, the hallway where the shooting took place, remains closed.

The district has not announced any plans to demolish the school.

Newsweek reached out to the Apalachee School District for comment.

Sandy Hook Elementary

Sandy Hook Elementary School students went to the nearby vacant Chalk Hill Middle School three weeks after Adam Lanza, 20, shot and killed 20 kids between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members.

The original Sandy Hook Elementary was torn down after the tragic event and a new school was built on the same property in 2016.

Newtown Public Schools Superintendent Anne Uberti declined to comment when contacted by Newsweek.

Robb Elementary School

Ten days after 19 children and 2 teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, the school district announced its plans to demolish the building.

The decision was met with mixed reactions from the community, as well as the families of the people who lost their lives in it.

Jerry Mata, whose 10-year-old daughter Tess was killed in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting last year, still returns to the campus of Robb Elementary to honor his child.

“I’ve been coming at nighttime, every once in a while,” Mata told ABC News on the school’s campus. “This was her last place, where she took her last breath. I have to come until it’s demolished.”

While the old school’s demolition has yet to be scheduled, construction of a new school adjacent to one of the community’s existing elementary schools is underway and students could attend it as early as 2025.

Newsweek has contacted the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District for comment.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

In July 2024, the building where the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, took the lives of 17 people in 2018, was demolished.

Students returned to the high school in the last months as there are no plans to rebuild on the now-empty lot. The school district says the land is now prepared for its next steps, with ideas including a legacy sports field or memorial to honor the shooting victims.

“We are almost at the seven-year mark since our tragedy, and I can tell you, the recovery efforts are still underway,” Michelle Kefford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, told CNN last month.

“Every parent, every staff member who experiences this horrific tragedy, goes through their own journey of recovery, and even though they experienced the same tragic event, everybody’s road and healing is very, very different, so everybody has different needs.”

“I can speak for our school district in our state, the great state of Florida, that we have an incredibly robust behavioral threat assessment program, suicide risk assessment, a program as well, where we are constantly talking to students,” she added.

“There is a very, very well-known See Something, Say Something philosophy here, and kids, parents, and community members are not afraid to say something when they see something, which really helps us get ahead of anything and also identify those red flags.”

Newsweek has contacted Kefford and Broward County Public Schools for comment.

Columbine High School

Columbine High School remained closed for the rest of the school year after gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and 1 teacher on April 20, 1999. School officials said most of the 23,000 square foot school was damaged from the attack with an estimated 900 to 1,000 bullet and shrapnel holes left in walls and ceilings.

Students finished the school year at the nearby Chatfield High School and returned to Columbine the next school year. The library, where the massacre took place, was blocked off and later knocked down and replaced by the newly built Hope Library.

In July 2019, Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Jason Glass announced Columbine would not be demolished after 55 percent of community members in a 7,000-person survey responded that rebuilding the school was “not really important” or “not important at all.”

In a letter to the community, Glass stated that Columbine “is now arguably one of the safest schools in the world.” However, even decades after the massacre, the school still experiences issues with visitors who have “a morbid fascination” with the tragic event. Glass said there are “hundreds of individuals” per year that try and enter Columbine so the district would work to create a more defined perimeter around the building to combat the problem.

Newsweek has contacted the Jefferson County Public Schools district.

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